remember me as a time of day
by vodkaquiet
Summary: RivaMika - Sometimes the past is all you have.


Levi remembered her as death. Crawling under his thin, emotionless blue sheets and wrapping him in a tight embrace. She pressed herself against him, her lips on his, strands of her hair tickling the crinkles of his eyes. He remembered her hands – caressing his thighs, digging her nails into his skin, rubbing the base of his neck until he fell asleep.

The hands that bruised his bones and ran him with red, the voice that had ignited that thing people placed too much literary value on, the mouth that echoed his name.

He remembered her as the time he smiled. She kissed his eyelids and breathed his laughter.

But he was only the faint impression left behind in the sheets when she rose in the mornings, an afterthought like lipstick on a napkin or whiskey lingering on his breath or cigarette ashes. She stretched her arms above her head and exhaled deeply. Her silhouette blackened in the sun.

"Today is just a ghost haunting me." She would say. On days like this there was nothing he could do to drag her from past that gripped her, it had its claws in her. Just be _there _for her in ways he had never been for anyone else.

"You get nothing from living in the past." But it was pointless telling her something she didn't want to hear.

There was nothing left to fight for and she wouldn't let himself fall in love with him. He was a killer, the same as her.

She dreamed of home. Of her mother and father – the sweet bread her mother would bake, the stories her father would tell – of skipping stones with Armin and Eren, the weightlessness of their hands in hers. She felt invincible with them beside her. She felt loved.

She woke up. The smell of death and smoke burning her nostrils, tears on her pillow.

"You're going to be here, right?" Mikasa asked, not looking at him.

He said something impossible, "Always." He didn't know why he said it. Why he'd promise her something like that. Maybe he was getting sentimental.

She ran, he followed. Enjoying her quiet company, the trouble she always managed to find, the way she felt in his arms. He chased her for a long time. To the ends of the earth – their toes sank into the sand, their skin scraping against the craggy mountainside, their eyes burned from the cold (snowflakes melted on his tongue when he kissed her.) To a dingy bar, riding out a hangover in a dew kissed field naked in her arms. They had their fun, their adventures. They had nights when they couldn't sleep and the past overwhelmed them.

On dusty, broken shores he looked at her when her eyes were on the sky. There was a crack in the clouds. The red veneer of the sun bled through the insipid billows. He remembered watching sunrise after sunrise with her and falling asleep to her heartbeat. His ear pressed against her chest, his fingers curled around hers. He remembered waking up and not finding her there, the emptiness that washed over him and never left.

He remembered her as much as he was beginning to forget her.

It wasn't love, nor had it ever been, but it was something and something was all he had left in this merciless life.

She clawed at his skin – burrowing under it and lingered in his heart like a melody.

The notes were all wrong and the piano wasn't tuned properly, but it was still beautiful and haunting and the only music that colored his grey world.

The taste of blood never went away. The screaming in his ears was louder than the waves breaking against the shore. War made him forget who he was. No, he had forgotten long before that and if he was being honest he had never truly known who he was. War had made him into who he was. It had etched out the carving of a man who survived no matter the costs. But after war there was no use for men like him. Men like him went back to where they came from. Their services no longer needed.

It didn't take long before he fell back into old habits – the drinking and smoking and women. He thrived on adrenaline, but nothing ever set his skin on fire the way she did. She woke him up and made him feel _everything. _

She wasn't dead. No. She was too stubborn to die and too afraid to love. He'd know if she was dead. He'd feel it like a missing limb. No. Something _more _like his heart beating without him.

He always found her in the place between his dreams and awake. That quiet place where they didn't age. Where they weren't scarred or hallowed by the things they had done to survive.

Levi knew they would meet again. Across those memories they had laid ruin to. He'd wait for her. He'd wait to hold her again.


End file.
